OpenCms Days 2011

On the 9th and 10th of May Coranto participated to the OpenCmsDays 2011 in Cologne.

We were positively impressed by the high level of the meeting sessions for the quality of the proposed sessions and for the competence of the participants. Also to note was the perfect organization by Alkacon Software that handles the development of the project (we were particularly stunned by the respect of the schedule), the optimal location of the meeting and great liveability of the city of Cologne. The presentation oft he new features of version 8 have met our expectations. Through the introduction of "drag and drop", OpenCms is aligned with the latest innovative trends of CMS and is proposed as an innovative tool to manage editorial content.

We also have to note the full compatibility with the previous versions of OpenCms , which allows an easy upgrade to Verson8.

Those present at the meeting showed great attention and participation and expressed the desire to give annual meetings.

Finally we want to thank Alkacon for organizing the event and the great willingness showed by all staff members.

OpenCms days

Coranto will participate with a presentation entitled: “Managing data for holiday farms in Sardinia with OpenCms”.

AgriturismoIchnos - www.agriturismoichnos.com - is a website collecting data about 800 holiday farms companies in Sardinia. Data are stored in an external database and imported in OpenCms using a specific solution developed for this project but they can be applied to other environments.

The session will show our generic solution to import data from external database. Everything is designed with the collaboration of Talend Open Studio software.

Talend Open Studio is an open source solution for data integration.

We will show hot to import data to OpenCms without any need to write a single code line by the following steps:

1. creation of the xsd content definition in OpenCms;

2. scheme configuration in Talend Open Studio;

3. job creation on Talend Open Studio;

4. data export by Talend Open Studio;

5. data import to OpenCms.

OpenCms 8

 Version 8 of OpenCms was expected for the forth quarter of 2010. Some unexpected event occurred during the development and the release is now expected in coincidence with 9^th and 10^th may Koln OpenCms Days. There are great expectations for this version and particularly about the new editorial system for contents management called ADE (Advanced Direct Edit), that will enable editorial staffs to create, modify and publish directly with a “drag and drop” process. We will be in Koln to know more about this and we will give more details and our remarks when we will be back.

OpenCms modules

 Coranto have been trying and testing the different add-on modules that OpenCms provides. Particularly the modules developed by AlkaCon, called OAMP (OpenCms Add-on Module Package) stand out for their high integration level with the product and for the possibility to set up and personalize the modules for everybody’s own need.

Among the different modules some have reached a higher maturity and stability level (Newsletter, Webform, Webuser, Survey, Counter, Calendar, WebOpt, Syndacation Feed ), and they are those we offer; others have got bugs and they do not work properly on all browsers (Comment, DocCenter) and , for this reason, they are not offered as add-on. Some more others have been recently released (GeoMap, HtmlCleaner) and we have not yet tested them.

Modules are updated and frequently improved by AlkaCon: we are engaged to try and test any new release and we will let you know about them.